The Mouse & Me & The PC Make Three? One

IN THE HANDS OF scientists, the mouse is transformed into a guinea pig, the poor thing. He is experimented on and on endlessly. They shouldn´t.

In the hands of wonks like me, the mouse is transformed into a household pet, a darling animal: I use it as a pointing device for using Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2003. You should too.

The Friendly Mouse. I´m using the mouse as a metaphor, I am pleased to say, for the ease by which I can do my creative writing and technical writing and editing and reviewing and critiquing and desktop publishing using the personal computer. The mouse was invented earlier, in 1968; the personal computer as a complete system was invented about 10 years later, in 1977, with the appearance of the Apple II, created by Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak (Phil Ament, 2007, ideafinder.com). The Apple II introduced a reinvented mouse, and popularized its use (see SRI story below for more on the reinvented mouse).

Technically, a mouse is ´an input device used to control a pointer on a computer screen´ (Encyclopedia Tiscali, tiscali.co.uk). It looks like a mouse, that´s why. However, I´d rather simply say device and not input device, which is too restrictive. For instance, when I move that mouse and, with the pointer hovering, click on the icon for the printer, that´s not input; that´s output.

At home, we have an HP Compaq Presario C700 laptop with Intel dual-core processors (both running at 1.6 GHz), 1 GB memory, Internet-enabled. Fast, very fast. The touchpad is a sorry device as far as I´m concerned; whoever invented the touchpad had slow fingers. I prefer the mouse to the touchpad – the touchpad is a touchy subject to me, as it is more sluggish than a turtle when it moves.

I use the mouse in running (not walking) programs, opening windows, clicking menus & icons & boxes, formatting words & lines and pages, dragging images. I use it more than the keyboard, even considering the countless keyboard shortcuts I have memorized to run Windows and Word 2003.

I´m ambidextrous when it comes to the mouse – I can use my left hand just as fast and as well as I do my right hand. I´m right-handed, but I taught myself to be more than that. Years ago, I told myself, why should not my left hand know what my right hand does?

My favorite mouse is the one with the wheel on top front; the wheel is for scrolling up or down slowly or fast. In the last 12 years or so, for optical mouses, we have had A4Tech, Logitech, Genius, Microsoft, ekes and others easily forgettable. My favorite is the ekes mouse (see image, with a short M&G Sign Pen beside it), as it fits into my palm exactly, fits my pocket, and fits my idea of beauty in a mouse.

When I move it, I like my mouse to display pointer tails and to automatically move the pointer to the default button in a dialog box. So, I don´t need to look for the box to click; the pointer itself magically rests on the box I should pay attention to, and all I have to do is click. What I do is sometimes referred to as point & click computing.

The computer mouse was invented by Douglas Engelbart of Stanford Research Institute, SRI at Menlo Park in California and first demonstrated publicly in 1968 (sri.com). There´s a great story of the PC mouse in Stanford Magazine by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang (´Mighty Mouse,´ stanfordalumni.org). At that time, 1980, the Xerox mouse cost $400; Steve Jobs of Apple had an idea and talked to Dean Hovey with his gang of fresh Stanford graduates working for 2-year old Hovey-Kelley Design. ´Jobs wanted a mouse that could be manufactured for $10 to $35, survive everyday use and work on his jeans.´ They delivered, and they all changed the world of personal computing.

Webopedia (Webopedia.com) has a nice entry on the subject of its nickname mouse, aside from its looks: ´the fact that one must make it scurry along a surface.´ And that´s exactly what I make it do all the time. This is the noiseless mouse whose roar has been heard around the world.

Webopedia also says ´the mouse is one of the great breakthroughs in computer ergonomics because it frees the user to a large extent from using the keyboard.´ That´s a limited view, because personal computing is not a choice between using the keyboard and the mouse – they go together. You cannot avoid using the keyboard; you cannot avoid using the mouse. The mouse is a great breakthrough, but it is not at the expense of the keyboard.

The ´computer mouse heading for extinction´ – that´s the headline of Australian journalist Guy Dixon´s brief news item (21 July 2008, pcauthority.com.au). He believes the experts who say the Wii MotionPlus and iPhone show the way of the future, and the mouse isn´t there. But the keyboard will be there. Dixon quotes Steven Prentice, Vice President of Gartner Fellow, as saying:

For all its faults, the keyboard will remain the primary text input device. Nothing is easily going to replace it. But the idea of a keyboard with a mouse as a control interface is breaking down.

Dixon says the touch screen and facial recognition are usurping the role of the mouse. I don´t think so. Touch screens are clumsy – fingers are always clumsy. The only way fingers can be precise is through the keyboard and the mouse with that cursor. The users of touch screens and facial recognition are amateurs, not productive, creative souls, as are those who predict the demise of the mouse.

I position the mouse as a user-friendly device because it is, but you have to make friends with it. Here are some tricks with the mouse and Windows XP / Vista and Microsoft Office 2003:

(1) Making shortcuts – Click on the Windows icon, click on Microsoft Office, right click on Microsoft Office Word 2003, right click Send To, click Desktop (Create shortcut) – done! You can do the same with other programs.

(2) Pointer tails – Click on the Windows icon, click Control Panel, click Pointer Options, click Snap Visibility, click OK. Done. This will give you not really pointer tails but shadows of the arrowhead shape in your cursor.

(3) Jump to – Click on the Windows icon, click Control Panel, click Pointer Options, click Snap To, click OK. The next time you need to click an open box, your cursor will jump to that box, and you need not look for it. Saves you a lot of energy.

(4) Clearing your desktop – Right click on your desktop, View, Show Desktop Icons (check or uncheck). The clutter appears and disappears magically!

(5) Background image – I found yesterday several photos of Emma Watson and I just created a collage of those using Picasa 3. Click, click, click! Then I right click the image I created, click Set As Desktop Background and, voila! Emma Watson is the central figure in that collage, that one with ´the small wardrobe malfunction,´ with 18-year old pretty Emma accidentally flashing part of her underwear standing on the red carpet on the rain-soaked night of the London premiere of Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince, 6th in the series (Katherine Thomson, 09 July 2009, huffingtonpost.com).

(6) Multiple open windows – I´m a multi-tasker, and I always open many programs or windows of the same file, and I can hardly do that with the keyboard.

(7) Dragging an image – Try dragging an image from a Windows folder to your open, blank Word 2003 document and you´ll see what I mean. It´s that easy, and nice.

Long live the mouse!